Suffolk County Council

Following a very successful pilot, Suffolk County Council has decided to extend its contract with C3, suppliers of LookOut call, for a further two years.

The system is being used by more than 400 staff across the Council, including 100 social workers. Staff from education, environmental, trading standards and racial harassment departments are also benefiting from LookOut call which supports the risk assessment process.

 “It is flexible enough to be deployed by many different departments across the Council”, says Robin Guy, Asst Head of Risk Management, Adult Care and Community Services.  “Users simply leave a message that is relevant to their particular group such as …walking around XXX school building clock wise, or visiting John Smith at 1 The High Street.”

The council decided to look into using an automated system further to the “ National Task Force Initiative on Violence against Social Care Staff”, set up by Frank Dobson, then Secretary of State for Health, to look at incidences of violence against lone workers”. Until that point the Council had been using a manual solution.

A full risk assessment was carried out by Suffolk County Council and a tender of requirements was sent to 8 different organisations.

LookOut call was chosen because of its flexibility to be customised to meet very specific requirements stipulated by the council. They were very concerned about security and confidentiality so LookOut call was customised to allow multi-level security. Suffolk County Council also needed LookOut call to be made available for the hard of hearing, and to achieve this it was simply adapted to work via PDA’s or GPRS-enabled mobile phones to allow updates to be made via the Internet.

“We are very pleased with how LookOut call works” says Robin Guy. “We gave our staff a great deal of support and training during the implementation process. LookOut call gives them confidence, knowing that an alarm will be raised if an incident occurs”.